NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day Collection

The Gamma Ray Sky

What if you could see gamma rays [ http://cossc.gsfc.n…]? If you could, the sky would seem to be filled with a shimmering high-energy glow from the most exotic and mysterious objects [ http://www.pbs.org/…] in the Universe. In the early 1990s NASA's orbiting Compton Observatory [ http://antwrp.gsfc.…], produced this premier vista of the entire sky in gamma rays [ http://www.gamma.mp…tvuniv.htm ], photons with more than 40 million times the energy of visible light [ http://www.pbs.org/…]. The diffuse gamma-ray glow from the plane of our Milky Way [ http://antwrp.gsfc.…] Galaxy runs horizontally through the false-color image. The brightest spots in the galactic plane (right of center) are pulsars [ http://antwrp.gsfc.…], spinning magnetized neutron stars formed in the violent crucibles of stellar explosions [ http://antwrp.gsfc.…]. Above and below the plane, quasars [ http://antwrp.gsfc.…], believed to be powered by supermassive black holes, produce gamma-ray beacons at the edges of the universe. The nature of many [ http://adsabs.harva…1996A&AS..120C.465M& db_key=AST ] of the fainter sources remains unknown [ http://antwrp.gsfc.…].

EGRET Team [ http://lheawww.gsfc…egret.html ], Compton Observatory [ http://cossc.gsfc.n…], NASA [ http://www.nasa.gov/]

gamma-ray

pulsars

quasars

allsky

Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC)

Washington, D.C.

EGRET

http://antwrp.gsfc.…

SPD-APOD-ap020112